Yesterday was the reception for the annual all-member show for the San Diego Portrait Society. And I am very pleased to announce that my two paintings "Train of Thought" and "Don" won awards,

My 12 x 16" painting of my late friend Don Flaws won First Place Honorable Mention.

And my 24 x 30" painting entitled "Train of Thought" won Best of Show for this year.

And a detail:

This is a great honor for me as it is a show with a lot of other really strong and well-executed paintings. If you are in San Diego, you can still see the show until May 29. The gallery hours for the Poway Center for the Performing Arts are Tuesday through Friday, 9:00am to 5:00pm and Saturdays from 11:00am to 3:00pm or during regularly scheduled performances at the theater (www.powayarts.org).

The San Diego Union Tribune had me do a new illustration for their story on Oscar picks. I did this one in oils on gessoed panel. And before beginning, I decided to try to change up my illustration style a little bit. I wanted to simplify the process and use clean but painterly strokes. Dan Adel was my source of inspiration here, both compositionally and stylistically.

The painting shows Colin Firth from The King's Speech and Natalie Portman from Black Swan. Natalie's likeness was elusive. And when I finally got a sketch I liked, I found that once the Swan makeup is on her, it really camouflages her likeness anyway. And there didn't seem to be any way around it. If you look at the original Black Swan movie poster, it's pretty much impossible to tell who she is even in that. And that is a photo! So I thought I'd have a little fun with her and give her the crazy eyes from the end of the movie.

I don't know if I'll continue to paint in this simplified manner. But it is always a good exercise to experiment with your technique to try and figure out what works for you and what doesn't.

Recently, I received a commission to paint a fast alla prima style caricature portrait for a young man in the Netherlands named Bowie. He just received the original in the mail and sent me this really nice video thank you card.

And here is my photo of the painting. I did this one without much of a pre-drawing. Just a quick sketch on paper, and I used that as a guide to paint the 12 x 16 inch gessoed panel.

Here's my latest illo for the San Diego Union Tribune's Night and Day section, weekend edition. This time, the editors added a small version of my work in the masthead of A1. That's top o' the front page, to you and me.

Here's the paper out in the newsstands today:

And here's the full illustration on the cover of the Night and Day section:

And here's the original image. I drew and painted this entirely in Photoshop from start to finish, because I thought all the different elements in the composition would be a little too much to tackle in oils. JLo's face gave me the most trouble. She looks so different in every photo. I tried several versions of her, working from different photos and expressions until I finally arrived at this one, which I'm really happy with.